Masteries

Offense:
9

Defense:
21

Utility:
0

Introduction

Poppy is not a tank. Poppy is not an offtank. Poppy is not physical DPS. Ok, now that we've defined what Poppy is clearly not, let's move on to what it is.

Poppy is a magical DPS.

This is not the kind of guide that you are probably used to see about Poppy. I do play a lot of Twisted Treeline lately because I find it more challenging in the way that every errors counts way more than in a regular 5v5 game and that you need to be perfect (or at least, really better than your opponents) in order to achieve victory.

Poppy is my favorite character, and I really wondered how I could port him to a 3v3 with the following objectives in mind :

Be able to survive every fights. A death in 3v3 means 33% less staff in your team, where it is only 20% in a 5v5. That sounds logic, but think about it. If you die in a 5v5, where you represent 20% of the team, each member now has to be 25% of the team, hence only 5% more. If you die in a 3v3, your teamates has to be 50% of the team, which is a 17% increase from what they are supposed to be. That's a big difference!

Be able to one or two shots that ranged carry, since it is your primary role to take it down before he kills your team. If you kill an opponent, each remaining one needs to be 17% better in order to make it (remember?).

Move fast to be able to gank and be the master of the jungle. A MIA Poppy is a scary poppy for anyone venturing into the jungle because you gonna crush them in walls and kill them in one or two shots.

If this is the way you want to play your Poppy, go ahead and read the rest of this guide. Otherwise, I suggest you play Tryndamere, he is quite easy to master and pubstomp with.

I do not claim with this guide that I am an excellent player, neither that this is the only way to play Poppy, but by all means what I say is this is the best way I found that I could play Poppy and clearly be a positive asset to my team.

Runes

My choice of runes is fairly straightforward. In order to keep on with my objectives, I need :

More HP to survive better.

Magic penetration to kill faster.

Cooldown reduction to kill faster and survive better (yay!).

Why do I choose magic penetration over armor penetration? About 85% of your damage output comes from your skills, which does magic damage. Also, Heroic Charge benefits twice from this as this does magic damage on initial hit, plus more magic damage if it collides with terrain.

Masteries

My masteries were chosen with the same objectives in mind. I went for 15% magic penetration with more survivability, hence the 9/21/0 build.

Items

First of all, Sheen is ********. I don't mean it to say differently than all the others Poppy around, just do the math. Suppose that you have a base damage of 50. If you have Sheen, your base damage gets increased by 80%, which means you get 90 damage, so +40. Also, this damage will be reduced by whatever armor they got right now. Now let's suppose you have +20 magic penetration (Sorcerer's shoes). This will be applied once for heroic charge initial hit, once for heroic charge when the enemy collides with terrain and once on devastation blow. This means +60 damage that is not affected by any means, since if they get to lower than 0 magic resist, the damage is then multiplied.

Once this is understood, we need to take a look at the multipliers that are applied to Poppy. For every +1 AP you have, you get +.6 damage on devastation blow and +(.4*2) on heroic charge, meaning you get a total of +1.4 damage. This is actually one of the best ratio in the game (well, we're not quite close to the +2.5 on Nunu's ult, but hey, let's take it).

So now on, every items that contributes to Poppy should be considered this way :

Magic Peneration, which gives plainly (3 * value) in pure damage.

AP, which gives (+1.4) in damage that can be mitigated by magic resist (remember that magic penetration?)

AD, which gives (+1) in damage that can be mitigated by armor. Bleh, it sucks.

There is one downside for MP. It does not scale at all with Poppy ultimate, which gives +% damage. That's why we get AP!

So now on, all the items that we build will either be MP, AP or HP. We love everything ending with a capital P.

I recommend you either start with Doran's shield OR boots + potions OR Sapphire Crystal + health potions. Then, rush for Sorcerer's Shoes as it gives movement speed AND magic penetration.

Then, go on with Rod of Ages. We're going to have more MUCH needed mana, HP and AP. Way to go! You can start with Catalyst the Protector since it will help us while leveling.

Go for Void Staff as it is cheap +70 AP and +20 MP. Then, if the game is not over yet, get Abyssal Scepter for more AP, MP and some MR. If the game is still not over yet, Rabadon's Deathcape is alwaysa great choice, but you should probably get something for more survivability at this point. A death at that stage of the game can cause a loss pretty easily...

In order for Void Staff to be better than Abyssal Scepter, they have to at least have 70 MR. You already got Sorcerer's shoes, which remove 20 MR, so they get down to 50. Then, 40% off 50 means 20. With 70 MR, Void Staff is basically the same as Abyssal Scepter, except that Abyssal is an AoE debuff and provides 57 MR for merely 400 golds, which clearly is better. In my opinion, you should go for Void Staff if they stack MR, Abyssal Scepter otherwise.

Other great items are :

Meijah's Soulstone (think about it, with 1.6 factor, you get +25 damage per kill!)

Morello Evil Tome

Hextech Gunblade / Hextech Revolver

Trinity Force

How do I kill the other team carry?

That's a damn easy question to answer! Poppy can dish out more than 2k damage in a matter of seconds by simply using his ultimate on the carry (for the % added damage), then heroic charge and stun him into wall then use devastating blow. If he survived long enough (~5 sec), do the combo again and he's dead for sure.

Most of the time, the other team :

Won't notice their carry is getting attacked before he is dead

Won't run away since they didn't noticed their carry was dead

Once you have killed their carry, spot an enemy that you can use heroic charge on him to stun him into the terrain, and finish it off with devastation blow. Wash, rinse and repeat.

Skill Sequence

We can define skilling priority like this :

Diplomatic Immunity

Heroic Charge

Devastating Blow

Paragon of Dementia

R > E > Q > W

This is a pretty straightforward rule, but of course there is an exception: at level 4, get one level in W.

Farming

Farming money as Poppy can be pretty difficult. Nevertheless, you got two awesome skills for farming : Heroic Charge and Devastating Blow. When you know you are going to go to base soon, always empty your mana with those two and get as much kills as you can.

Of course, try to last hit minions as much as possible, but this is not always easy when there are some CC and ranged on the other team.

When you see a minion < 50% HP, you can finish it off with devastating blow. You should be able to keep up the rhythm once you get catalyst the protector.

Finally, last tip is to go into the jungle sometimes. You can easily defeat minions by charging them since they are all close to walls.